Automatic GPL termination

[Philippe Verdy]

I am not saying that, reread, exactly : you are subject to the terms of the
licence that COMES WITH the covered work, as soon as you are exposed to it
with that work.

Thez author may publish something with a given version of the GPL and then
ignore any other version and could safely reject any further provision of
the later version, as long as he does not reuse in his software some other
works coming to him from a third party with that newer version.

 

So anyone, including authors, are liable only for the version of the GPL
text that comes WITH the covered work. The “any later version” sentence in
the copyright notice means nothing as long as you don’t agregagate the work
with other works, and if you are just republishing the work without
modifiying it, you have no obligation to upgrade the version of the GPL (but
the GPL says that you, as a distributor, are allowed to upgrade it with YOUR
republication).

 

But authors remain liable for the version of the GPL that he chose to place
his published work under, independently of the “any further version”
sentence that is included in the copyright notice as an ADDITIONAL RIGHT
(that remains optional according to the GPL itself).

 

But if someone else receives a copy from a distributor that upgraded the
version of the GPL without modifying the work, this user is NOT allowed to
downgrade the version of the GPL for his own republication, unless he finds
another allowed distributor (such as from the original author himself) that
publishes the same work under the original licence with a lower version. So
to downgrade a GPL version, you need to prove yourself that the exact same
work was published with that lower version (and the only way to prove it
safely is by trying to find the original author or initial place of
publication,something that should remain possible because of the
conservation of the copyright notice that includes an attribution of the
original author).

 

If you can’t find the original author or initial place of publication, then
you can’t easily prove that the lower version is valid, and so you cannot
downgrade the version of the GPL, and the only thing you can do is to trust
the version of the GPL that you received along with the covered work.

 

Proving an authorship can be done by any legally recognized mean, including
enough legal testimonies from other people. This may be the only way if the
author has disappeared or his dead, but his author rights are still
surviving and in the hands of its legal successors (just finding a reference
to the same work published on the web in a place that cannot trace who
placed the content on that server is not a proof, and finding X references
within a web search engine or automatic mirror is not a proof, unless the
mirror was legally built or permitted by the right owner himself, for
example by buying a web hosting space with a traceable commercial
transaction and a signed agreement with the hosting provider).

 

  _____  

De : Chris Travers [mailto:chris.travers at gmail.com] 
Envoyé : lundi 17 septembre 2007 23:21
À : license-discuss at opensource.org
Objet : Re: Automatic GPL termination

 

 

On 9/17/07, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

Alexander Terekhov [mailto:alexander.terekhov at gmail.com] wrote:
> One just can't be a party to a contract that
> isn't even drafted yet.

Untrue. The licence is published, immutable, and publicly verifiable (unlike

almost all contracts that are privately written). Because the contract is
public, it can't be negociated between parties (it can only be accepted as a
whole or rejected as a whole). For this reason the GPLpreexists as a written

contract between the author and the public (this including every other
user). It has already been accepted as valid by a very large number of users
(and authors using it), much enough to prove that the contract is valid, 
because millions of people could assert that it exists in its current form.


I don't think you are contradicting Alexander here.  If I agree to make my
work available under the GPL v3 or later, this does not mean that sometime
after this, if the FSF adopts a new license with additional requirements on
me that I am automatically bound by them.  GPL vX or later does not mean
"subject to additional obligations that the FSF may, from time to time, deem
appropriate..." 


In short I don't think there is much disagreement on this point.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

 

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